Fiber is playing a more and more dominant role in telecom networks. Up till now, the use of fiber has been mainly limited to long-haul and metro networks. Recently, more and more operators have started to use fiber in the access. Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH), Fiber-To-The-Building (FTTB), advanced Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC) and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) networks all require fiber on a large scale.
The management of the physical layer, i.e. the fiber itself, has not seen a lot of innovation in the last decade. Manual Optical Distribution Frames (ODFs) usually terminate the fibers, coming from the outside plant, inside the Central Office (CO) on an optical connector. A Central Office is a building that houses all the transmission equipment of an operator. This optical connector provides the flexibility required for reconfiguration, further upgrades, redundancy or test access. Typical ODFs are frames of 2 m high and 1 m wide, terminating 500+ fibers.
Furthermore, fiber-rich architectures, like fiber-to-the-home, will require a flexibility point outside the CO as well. Typically, street cabinets are used to collect the fibers from the neighborhood and transport the information to the central office.
Reconfiguration of the physical fibers is often necessary. Some example occasions are listed below:                During network build or commissioning.        When a customer wants a connection.        When the network needs to be tested for pro-active monitoring.        When the network needs to be tested for troubleshooting.        When a customer wants to stop the service.        When a customer wants move to another operator in open access networks (churn).        When a customer wants another service, i.e. grooming, load balancing.        During network upgrades.        Etc.        
Every time an activity like the ones listed above, is required, a truck roll and a manual intervention will be necessary. These interventions are expensive, require 24/7 availability of skilled technicians and the risk of making errors is substantial. In some cases, the ODF or street cabinet, such as a Fiber Distribution Hub (FDH) becomes a big issue in the network if the fibers are not managed in the correct way. Furthermore, the information database comprising information of the network is not always in line with the reality, because every change in the network needs to be reported to the database system manually. Most of the fiber optic patch panels that are currently available on the market are bulky due to big dimensions of the connectors, the big cable diameters and cable bend radius restrictions.
Therefore, automated fiber management has been discussed. Most of the full optical switches available on the market today, are high-end products that are too expensive for use in access networks. Their feature set, i.e. switching time/optical losses etc, is somewhat different from what will be required in access networks. The most popular technology for optical switches is three dimensional (3D) Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, where micro-mirrors are used to reflect the light beam. Changing the position of these mirrors may reflect the light in another direction. However, such fully automated cabinets have some disadvantages such as a very high initial cost, weak optical performance and the cabinet itself is bulky and not scalable. Further, fully automated ODFs used in access networks do not provide a “latching” feature, which means that they need both power and a backup power source. There is also reliability issues associated with the fully automated ODFs, when such a high end product becomes a single point of failure.
Up till now, there are no operators deploying fully automated switches in the access network on a large scale because of the issues mentioned above.